A Bad Metaphor
If roasting tomatoes removes the sin
is it true for books or martyrs?
We inherit the taste for sinful flesh as original
as when Eve offered the first bite (Old Adam, you,
who cannot admit your secret desire to love
tomatoes in their wicked state tho’ it would save
trouble withal in the cooking) and this is why
some like their steaks rare or at least pink
in the middle; centuries of self-flagellating
sizzle not enough to cleanse our barbarian heart
(Old Adam, can I not purge you through smoke and flame?)
thus we pray pepper and salt can make us tasteful again.
An hour at 350 ought to do it.
©2010 Jennifer G. Knoblock
Hiding in the Garden
Crickets sing and I sit
on the concrete step where late summer
leanings of sunflower, zinnia overshadow
my silence. Long stifling August has given way
to this brown-green discord of lush and rustle.
It’s been dry.
Even so, bees and butterflies and lingering
beetles sip and flit and mate.
The seed must die to give new life.
I have been desperately clipping
spent blooms, grasping at beauty, gasping
with thirst while crickets sing
and brown embraces green.©2008 Jennifer G. Knoblock
Cemetery Walk
I.
Gravel rolls underfoot and in my ear
the soaring score of a movie soundtrack.
God is in it, the cemetery otherwise silent.
II.
Why do we build these monuments to ourselves—
as if the larger, squarer, and colder stone-chiseled
we make them,
the more likely someone will notice us in death?
Did they notice us in life?
Our marble monoliths scream our names to the world,
but only if the world will listen.
This cemetery is vacant but for its dead,
and one woman walking with music in her head.
III.
My father lies buried in a dusty small lot
in a dusty small town
in Texas. Nine years he lies buried,
to the week of my son’s birth,
and I could not attend the funeral.
He has no stone, no marble thing to scream
his name. My mother is angry and hurt
that I refuse to visit that dry silent grave.
But the stone is in my soul.
My father is not here.
©2008 Jennifer G. Knoblock
Heroics
My husband is traveling again,
He’s packing slacks and socks and handkerchiefs,
And I am folding his shirts.My husband is traveling again,
So I will be staying up much too late,
Watching movies in bed, maybe Pride and Prejudice or
Daniel Deronda, or really anything
With long skirts and bonnets
Or men in knee-breeches.My husband is traveling again,
The children and I will be eating mac and cheese
Or hot dogs or chicken nuggets,
And their homework won’t be done before supper,
And they’ll get to eat in front of the TV.My husband is traveling again.
You’d think by now we’d be used to it.
You’d think it wouldn’t make such a difference.©2008 Jennifer G. Knoblock
December
Earth and sky mix
the car ahead is swallowed
in gray like the image of my father
ten years gone but still in my dreams
he grins, gently teasing
alive again
It’s a sad time for your family
people say, December
your dad, sister’s husband
early darkness, closing of all things
But black grief contains the seed of its joy
we stumble toward it
my two daughters, a son (I see you
my father, all the time)
and in starry silence, the One
We lift our heads and listen
The year dies and turns
light again
©2009 Jennifer G. Knoblock
Can/Can’t
words/cook
garden/pots
sew/cut
grow/hairlaugh/spit
cry/fly
long/young
desire/lieplay/stay
pretend/pretend
fear/unfair
believe/not carelove/tender
sing/remember
pray/lose faith
leave/escape©2010 Jennifer G. Knoblock
